Sony's Showcase Was a Sequel Bonanza, and GTA V Slides Again
PlayStation's September Showcase brought Wolverine, Ragnarök, and Gran Turismo 7, plus timed exclusives and another GTA V delay.
Sony ran another PlayStation Showcase today and the headline is a genuine surprise: a standalone Marvel’s Wolverine game, in development for PS5, from the same Insomniac umbrella that gave us Spider-Man. No release window, barely a full trailer’s worth of footage, but the tone was unmistakable — mature, brutal, clearly aimed at an older audience than the Spider-Man games. Insomniac now has two major Marvel franchises running in parallel, which is either an incredible bet on their internal capacity or a sign that PlayStation Studios is about to get a lot bigger.
The rest of the show leaned on stuff we already knew was coming, just with fresher footage. God of War Ragnarök got a new trailer that mostly confirmed what the title implies — the Norse saga is building toward Ragnarök itself, with Kratos and Atreus dealing with the fallout of the first game’s ending. Gran Turismo 7 also got screen time, looking about like you’d expect from a franchise that’s always been more about fidelity than spectacle. Neither game got a hard date, which at this point in the console generation feels like the default state of things.
The exclusivity play
The more interesting business news buried in the showcase: Sony locked down timed PS5/PC console exclusivity for a trio of notable titles — Deathloop, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and a remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That’s a meaningful marketing commitment, and it says a lot about how aggressively Sony is willing to spend to keep third-party buzz pointed at PlayStation during this console shortage era. Deathloop and Ghostwire are both Bethesda-published, which is a little awkward given Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Bethesda’s parent company — these deals were presumably locked in before that deal closed, and it’ll be worth watching whether agreements like this survive once Xbox owns the publisher outright.
The KOTOR remake announcement is the one that’ll generate the most long-tail excitement. It’s been almost two decades since the original, and a modern take on that story — with current-gen production values — is the kind of thing that can single-handedly move consoles for a certain generation of RPG fans.
And the delay nobody’s shocked by
Rockstar confirmed the enhanced version of GTA V for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S has slipped from November to next March. If you’ve followed Rockstar’s release history at all, this is basically routine — the studio has never once shipped something exactly on the date it first announced. Still, it’s a reminder that even a decade-old, endlessly re-released game gets the same treatment as a from-scratch title when a studio wants to polish it further. GTA Online’s next-gen upgrade is presumably tied to the same timeline, so anyone hoping for a smoother, better-looking Los Santos this holiday season will need to wait a bit longer.
Taken together, today’s showcase was less about surprises and more about Sony flexing its checkbook — exclusivity deals, high-profile remakes, and a new AAA project from one of its most trusted studios. No PS5 supply announcements though, which remains the elephant in the room for anyone who still can’t buy one.